Informativity affects consonant duration and deletion rates

Abstract

The duration and occasional deletion rate of consonants differ from one language to another. What causes a language to preserve and lengthen some consonants but shorten and delete others? I show that the typology of consonant duration and occasional deletion in American English is affected by consonants' informativity -their average local predictability. Informativity can explain why usually-predictable segments such as American English /t/ are likely to be reduced even when they are locally unpredictable, but usuallypredictable segments are preserved even when they are redundant. I use four corpus studies to demonstrate that higher informativity leads to longer duration and reduced likelihood to delete even when other important factors such as the phonetic features, frequency, and local predictability of consonants are controlled for. The role of informativity in the duration and deletion rates of consonants can bridge the gap between phonetic performance and the actuation of phonological processes.

Whence the fuzziness? Morphological effects in interacting sound changes in Southern British English

“…The line of research on phonetics-lexicon interactions is important to acknowledge, as it potentially offers a way of reconciling apparently non-modular effects with a modular analysis. We know that lexical factors, such as neighbourhood size, frequency, or lexical predictability, influence continuous phonetic dimensions, such as for instance VOT, segmental duration, or degree of coarticulation (Munson & Solomon, 2004;Scarborough, 2004;Baese-Berk & Goldrick, 2009;Arnon & Cohen Priva, 2013;Cohen Priva, 2015). These findings have not led to a unanimous rejection of modular processing, as some psycholinguistic models have the capacity to capture such gradient phonetic effects using simultaneous activation of multiple categories.…”

Dimensions of Segmental Variability: Interaction of Prosody and Surprisal in Six Languages

“…Apart from lexical frequency, there is evidence of other systemic effects, such as informativity (Seyfarth, 2014;Cohen Priva, 2015). Informativity (Piantadosi et al, 2011;Cohen Priva, 2015) is the average predictability of a segment given its language-specific distribution in the lexicon.…”

“…Informativity (Piantadosi et al, 2011;Cohen Priva, 2015) is the average predictability of a segment given its language-specific distribution in the lexicon. In other words, informativity captures the amount of information a segment usually provides, i.e., how informationally useful it is across the entire language.…”

Predicting Perceptually Weak and Strong Unmarked Patterns: A Message-based Approach

“…It is also well supported by phonetic and psycholinguistic evidence showing the importance of certain positions for accurate word identification (e.g., Cutler et al 1985). In general terms, such PUCs are characterized as having acoustic/auditory prominence, and/or high informativity (Seyfarth 2014, Cohen Priva 2015, as stated in (4).…”

“…Zipf 1932;Aylett & Turk 2004;Cohen Priva 2015;Piantadosi et al 2011;Seyfarth 2014). Building on this work, we can make predictions about where in a message change would be most effective.…”